THREE SCORE AND TEN
By STEPHEN LEACOCK
OLD age is the "Front Line" of life, moving into No- man's Land. No-man's Land is covered with mist. Beyond it is Eternity. As we have moved forward the tumult that now lies behind us has died down. The sounds grow less and less. It is almost silence. There is an in- creasing feeling of isolation, of being alone. We seem so far apart. Here and there one falls, silently, and lies a little bundle on the ground that the rolling mist is burying. Can we not keep nearer? It's hard to see one another. Can you hear me? Call to me. I am alone. This must be near the end.
I was born seventy years ago, in Victorian England at its most Victorian, far away now, dated by the French Empire, still glittering, and Mr. Dickens writing his latest book on the edge of the grave while I thought out my first on the edge of my cradle, and, in America, dated by people driving golden spikes on Pacific railroads.
Moving pictures love to give nowadays " cavalcades " of events, to mark the flight of time. Each of us carries his own. Mine shows, as its opening, the sea beaches of the Isle of Wight . . . then turn on Portchester village and its Roman castle . . . Queen Victoria going past in a train, in the dark, putting her head out of the window (her eight heads out of eight windows) . . . Now shift to an Atlantic sailing-steamer (type of 1876), with people emigrating to Canada . . . then a Canadian farm lost up near Lake Sim- coe for six years . . . put in bears, though there weren't any . . . boarding-school scenes at Upper Canada College . . . the real old rough stuff . . . University, cap and gown days, old style, put a long beard on the president, show fourteen boarding-houses at four-fifty a week . . . school teaching—ten years—run it fast—I want to forget it . . . then make the film Chicago University with its saloons of forty years ago, a raw place, nowhere to smoke . . . and then settle the film down to McGill University, and run it round and round as slowly as you like for thirty-six sessions —college calling in the autumn, students and co-eds and Rah, Rah, all starting afresh, year after year . . . college in the snow, the February classroom, hush! don't wake them, it's a lecture on archaeology . . . all of it again and again . . . college years, one after the other . . . throw in, as interludes, journeys to England . . . a lecture trip round the Empire . . . put in Colombo, Ceylon, for atmosphere . . . then more college years . . . then loud music and the Great War with the college campus all at drill, the boys of yesterday turned to men . . . then the war over, lecture trips to the U S pictures of Iowa State University . . . Ladies' Fortnightly Clubs . . . about forty of them . . then back to the McGill campus . . . retirement . . . an honorary degree (" this venerable scholar ") . . . and then unexpectedly the war again and the Black Watch back on the McGill campus . . . such is my picture, the cavalcade all the way down from the clouds of the morning, to the mists of the evening.
That is how life goes. The child says "When I am a big boy "—but what is that? The boy says "When I grow up "—and then, grown up,—" When I get married." But to be married, once done and over, what is that again? The man says "When I can retire "—and then, when retirement comes, he looks backs over the path traversed, a cold wind sweeps over the fading landscape and he feels somehow that he has missed it all. For the reality of life, we learn too late, is in the living tissue of it from day to day, not in the expectation of better, nor in the fear of worse. Those two things, to be always looking ahead, and to worry over things that haven't yet happened and very likely won't happen—those take the very essence out of life. If only one could live each moment to the full, in a present, intense with its own absorption, even if as transitory and evanescent as Einstein's " here " and "now." It is strange how we cry out in our collective human mind against this restless thinking, and clamour for time to stand still—longing for a land where it is always afternoon, or for a book or verses underneath a bough, where we may let the world pass on.
But perhaps it is this worry, this restlessness, that keeps us on our necessary path of effort and endeavour. Most of us who look back from old age have at least a comfortable feeling that we have "got away with it." At least we kept out of gaol, out of the asylum, and out of the poorhouse. Yet one still needs to be careful. Even "grand old men" get fooled sometimes. But at any rate we don't want to start over again ; no, thank you, it's too hard. When I look back to long evenings of study in boarding-house bedrooms, night after night, one's head sinking at times over the dictionary I wonder how I did it.
And schooldays—at Upper Canada College, anno domini 1882. Could I stand that now? If some one asked me to eat " supper " at six, and then go and study next day's lessons, in silence in the long study from seven to nine- thirty, how would that be? A school waiter brought round glasses of water on a tray at half-past eight, and if I had asked for whiskey and soda could I have had it? I could not. Yet I admit there was the fun of putting a bent pin —you know how, two turns in it—on the seat where the study master sat. And if I were to try that now at Convo- cation they wouldn't understand it. Youth is youth, and age is age.
On the world of youth old age can only gaze with admira- tion. As people grow old all youth looks beautiful to them. The plainest girls are pretty with nature's charm. The dullest duds are at least young. But age cannot share it. Age must sit alone. The very respect that young people feel for the old, or at least for the established, the respect- able, those " illusions " of which I spoke, make social unity impossible. An old man may think himself a "hell of a feller" inside, but his outside won't justify it. He must keep to his corner, or go " ga-ga," despised of youth and age alike.
And, anyway, to put it frankly, old men are tiresome company. They can't listen. I notice it round my club. We founded it thirty years ago, and the survivors are all there, thirty years older than they were thirty years ago, and some even more, yes, much more. Can they listen? No, not even to me. And when they start to tell a story they ramble on and on—and you know the story anyway, because it's the one you told them yesterday. Young people when they talk together have to be snappy and butt in and out of conversation as they get a chance. But once old men are given rope, you have to pay it out to them like a cable. To my mind the only tolerable old men are the ones—you notice lots of them when you look for them— who have had a stroke—not a bad one, or a tragic one, but just one good flap as a warning. They get quiet and docile. When I want to tell a story I pick out an old man who's had a stroke, or even two.
The path through fife I have outlined from youth to age you may trace for yourself by the varying way in which strangers address you. You begin as "little man," and then "little boy," because a little man is littler than a little boy ; then "sonny," and then "my boy," and after that "young man," and presently the interlocutor is younger than yourself. and says "Say, mister." I can still recall the thrill of pride I felt when a Pullman porter first called me "doctor," and when another one raised me up to "judge," and the terrible shock it wa3 when a taxi-man swung open his door and said "step right in, dad." It was hard to bear when a newspaper reporter spoke of me as the "old gentleman" and said I was very simply dressed. He was a liar ; those were my best things. It was a worse shock when a newspaper last autumn called me a septua- genarian—another cowardly lie, as I was only sixty-nine and seven-twelfths. Presently I shall be introduced as "this venerable old gentleman," and the axe will fall when they raise me to "grand old man." That means on our con- tinent anyone with snow-white hair who has kept out of gaol till eighty. That's the last and worst they can do to you.
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